Yoast SEO 4.1 Mobile snippet preview and German readability analysis

Joost de Valk is the founder and Chief Product Officer of Yoast and the Lead Marketing & Communication for WordPress.org. He's a digital marketer, developer and an Open Source fanatic.

As you might know, we’ve added quite a few new features to Yoast SEO over the last few months. Today marks the release of Yoast SEO 4.1, the first of many releases to come in the new year. Besides fixing some bugs, this version comes with two major new features: a mobile snippet preview and full support for the German language in the readability and content analysis.

Mobile snippet preview

Since mobile traffic has eclipsed desktop traffic, it’s imperative that you optimize your site in any way you can for mobile. One of these improvements is to make your text snippets better for mobile use. For years, Yoast SEO offered a way of seeing what the text snippet would look like in search engines. However, it was not possible to check mobile snippets yet. Luckily, that’s about to change.

Yoast SEO 4.1 adds a mobile snippet preview, so you can now directly check what your snippet looks like on mobile. The default view is the desktop, but you can easily switch between the views, so you can get a good idea of how your post will be presented in the search results depending on which view you choose. This way you can write a perfect snippet text that works well on mobile and desktop. This first release is fairly modest in execution and will be fine-tuned further down the road.

German readability and content analysis

Yoast SEO doesn’t just improve the technical side of your WordPress site, but also provides invaluable tools that help you to write quality content. The innovative Content Analysis tool analyzes the blog post you are writing in real-time and suggests improvements for SEO and readability. In the past, these readability suggestions were only available in English, but the Yoast Content Analysis now fully supports German as well. More languages are on the way.

Not only does full language support for German allows Yoast SEO 4.1 to analyze the readability of a German text, but it also enables Yoast SEO Premium to provide internal linking suggestions in German. This means that, when writing a post in German, you will get suggestions for related articles on your site, that you could consider linking to. Building a perfect site structure has never been easier.

Fun fact: To fully understand the post and to give valuable suggestions, we have to filter out unnecessary words or other words that get in the way of discerning the meaning of a post. For the English language, we use a long list of words that we’ll automatically filter out. For German, it seems we needed an even longer list because of the grammatical cases. Check this example: In English it’s “a”, “an” and “the”, while the German language has “das”, “dem”, “den”, “der”, “des”, “die”, “ein”, “eine”, “einem”, “einen”, “einer”, “eines”. See what we mean? We can’t wait to see what the Dutch language has to offer.